I.

Twenty years ago, my friend’s mom hovered nervously around the prescriptions pick-up counter in a local pharmacy. In her hand was a crumpled doctor’s requisition for her son with an order for Ritalin, a medication that masks the symptoms of ADHD.1 She stood at the counter staring at the white coats mixing and pressing and bottling pills. Then she tucked the little paper back in her purse, turned sharply on a heel, and dashed out leaving the order unfilled.

Recounting the story to her son, she still can’t articulate why she walked out that day. She attributes it to a deep-rooted hard-to-place-a-finger-on feeling that it was wrong to medicate her six-year-old son. My friend shudders at the thought of the person he may have become had his mom filled that prescription.

I don’t think you can medicate a child with amphetamines and expect them to develop into the same person as if they had learned to regulate their attention, emotions, and impulses naturally. But even if you can, that child will be reliant on medication just to get out of bed in the morning for the rest of their lives. And, as in the case of my friend, they may have never needed it in the first place.

Today, this friend is one of the hardest working and most focused people I know. I’ve lived and travelled with him, and he has no trace of any sort of attention or mood disorder. Whatever traits or tendencies his pediatrician was attempting to medicate away with that prescription, he learned to cope with on his own. And he likely developed better work ethic, tenacity, and self-belief because of it.

Although the greatest gift his mom gave him by leaving the pharmacy that day was his personal agency. Giving a kid a drug they don’t need tells them they can’t do it on their own. It seeds their malleable minds with a victim mentality; a lack of agency, learned helplessness, and negative self-talk. It teaches them to blame external forces for their misfortunes rather than digging down within themselves and building a well of resources to handle the world. A well that they will repeatedly draw upon over their life in dark, harsh, and challenging moments.

Being told you need medication to get by when your life has barely begun rips the rug of agency right out from under your feet. And agency—the capacity to act autonomously, consciously, and intentionally—is the most important ingredient to creating a good life.

II.

We are in an over-prescription crisis.

In attempt to dampen every imperfect human tendency left within us, we’re dousing ourselves and our kids with drugs. Our twenty-first century cultural values of quick-fix, low-effort solutions are driving us to pills to eradicate the responsibility of managing the messier parts of the human experience.

The management of our mood, attention, and bodyweight are the three realms of human responsibility I see most outsourced to drugs like SSRIs, SNRIs, Adderall, and GLP-1s. This increasing societal drug-dependency to help us cope with being human is a serious epidemic. Nearly half of all Canadians with a mood disorder take medication alone to deal with their problem.2 In the U.S., 16% of all adults take prescription medication for their mental health.3 And these stats are 7+ years old.

Our mood, attention, and weight are human responsibilities and, as evidenced by the 300,000 years of human existence before us, most of us have the capacity to build up the internal machinery to manage them on our own. When we refuse to carry the human burden of managing these aspects of our lives, and instead ask medication to do it for us, the tinder catches a flame that begins a slow-burning decay in the quality of our minds, bodies, and lives.

By way of a disclaimer, I’m not against drugs. Many drugs perform miracles and can help prevent, cope with, and cure illness and disease. And some people genuinely need medication to handle their ADHD, anxiety, or depression. The drugs I see as destructive are those that mask problems instead of addressing the root cause and are turned to as the lowest effort, most expedient solution.

III.

Mood medications to treat anxiety and depression should be used as a life raft for those who are in a dark state of mind and are having thoughts to do something irreversible, such as suicide or self-harm.

But most people on mood meds are not suicidal. And while life rafts are great in emergencies, you wouldn’t want to cross the ocean in one.4

For the average person experiencing bouts of anxiety or depression, using these drugs is the equivalent of amputating a foot because of an ingrown nail. SSRIs and SNRIs, common anxiety and depression medications, can induce side effects like suicidal thoughts, weight gain or loss, insomnia, muscle spasms, heart arrythmias, sexual dysfunction, and God knows what else. These meds substitute normal, manageable human feelings with real, hard to fix, potentially life-threatening problems.

This is a tragedy because, as far as I can tell, most mood disorders are downstream of how we choose to live our lives.

Here’s an interesting stat to back this claim: prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications rose by 34% in the initial months of the COVID pandemic.5 The average pandemic lifestyle was one of isolation and sickening amounts of screen time. People sat inside, binged TV, scrolled social media with a newfound ferocity, doomscrolled news feeds, ordered everything from socks to supper online, and smoked and drank too much. In-person connection was eliminated completely, and almost no one got enough sunshine or exercise. The pandemic not only provided proof that your lifestyle can make you anxious and depressed, but it also showed us the type of lifestyle that is certain to do so.

Many people who find themselves unable to cope with anxiety and depression are still living a pandemic lifestyle. Then to fix the problem, they’re reaching for pills as the easiest solution on the shelf, while continuing to scroll TikTok and order DoorDash, rather than making the hard lifestyle changes that will get to the root problem. And like wrapping the leaking pipes below your kitchen sink with duct tape, quick effortless solutions are almost never effective over the long-term.

I learned from a visit to the ER in 2019, in which I thought I was having a heart attack that was really just a panic attack, that I subconsciously struggle with anxiety. I still have moments when it feels like a bag of bricks is sitting on my chest. But I’ve never considered taking medication for it because I’ve internalized that anxiety is a normal emotion that will eventually pass and can be managed with a little bit of effort. I know from experience, which studies have confirmed, that the best cures to anxiety and depressive episodes are movement, sleep, good food, time outdoors, social connection, kind deeds, and offline hobbies.

Put differently, the key to mood management is getting outside of yourself. Get out of your head and into your body. Get out of your home and into the outdoors. Get out of your selfish self-prioritization and do something of service for someone else.

Another big piece of coping with these emotions is recognizing that bouts of anxiety and depression are foundational to the human experience. Feeling them is no different than feeling joy, surprise, sorrow, and excitement. It’s not a popular message, given our modern expectation that everything should be perfect all the time, but we have to accept that we won’t always feel great. If we don’t, any negative feelings we experience will compound from the judgement that stems from non-acceptance. Sometimes we’ll feel down, and we won’t know why, and we’ll just have to ride it out until we turn the corner.

IV.

Another one of my friends was told by a therapist that they may have ADHD and should consider medication. This person has a five-year undergrad degree and is almost through a four-year post-grad. And they don’t even drink coffee to focus.

If someone purportedly displays ADHD tendencies, but has been successful in their life’s pursuits without pharmacological assistance, why would you suggest medicating them? We all have unique traits that exist on a spectrum. And like experiencing anxiety or depression, having above average hyperactivity or below average focus are just variations of the human condition. By definition, a disorder implies functional impairment. Unique variations of the human condition should not be medicated unless they impair one’s ability to live in a way that cannot be overcome through individual effort.

More importantly, attention is earned.

We seem to have forgotten this in a haze of ambitious over-medication, but the ability to focus, especially on something challenging for long periods of time, is hard work. It’s not supposed to be easy. Attention can be developed by consistently focusing on challenging tasks for increasingly long periods of time. But just as our attention muscles can be strengthened, they can also atrophy.

During the pandemic, when social media and screen use skyrocketed, prescriptions for stimulants to treat ADHD more than doubled.6 Furiously scrolling social media feeds while reality TV reruns play in the background destroys our ability to focus.

Many attention disorders are just internet addictions.

The most impactful force that shapes our attention span is how we choose to spend our leisure time. Low-quality leisure cultivates an inability to pay attention. But high-quality leisure, like reading a good book, carving a soapstone bear or a wooden spoon, taking a course, playing pickleball, gardening, cooking for friends, swimming at the local community centre, or quite literally anything that is not on a screen, trains your brain to relish slow, challenging, and ultimately more meaningful tasks.

When your leisure becomes consistently analog, you will be rewarded with a mind that can bask in the joy of slowness and focus for long periods of time. Your attention will improve, your brain will become boredom-proof, and your life will become more interesting and enjoyable.

V.

The world found its miracle weight loss drug in GLP-1s like Ozempic and Wegovy. But alas. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Despite the numerous physiological drawbacks of these drugs, like loss of lean muscle mass, significant weight gain upon discontinuation, gallbladder issues, potential thyroid cancer risks, permanent blindness (!!), etc., the quality-of-life and spiritual drawbacks may be even greater.

The thread I’ve tried to weave throughout this essay is that the management of our mood, attention, and bodyweight are aspects of the human condition that are our responsibility to handle, and to equip our children with the tools to handle. But with the rise of drugs that can manage them for us, too many of us have sidestepped the responsibility of doing so. And sidestepping responsibility has serious consequences.

Before being shot in the street, Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker (aka Spiderman), “With great power comes great responsibility.” The reverse is equally true. With great responsibility comes great power. When you seek out real responsibility and carry it earnestly, you’ll forge an inner power and belief in yourself that can only be built by choosing a big boulder and pushing it up a steep hill.

This is the story of Sisyphus in Greek mythology, who was forced, for eternity, to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time he neared the top. Although it was meant as a punishment, those of us who have achieved something or arrived somewhere know the human condition isn’t too different. As soon as we crest the top of the hill, the boulder rolls back down, and we begin again.

The most important aspect of the pursuit of physical fitness and health is the type of person you become along the way. The outcome of a lean and muscled stature is significantly less meaningful than the traits you develop and the crevasses of your psyche you discover as you pursue a healthy body. And health is a journey that does not end. So, if you fast-forward to skinny with Ozempic, you’ve achieved the result without becoming the person that is capable of achieving those results. You’ve robbed yourself of the journey of becoming. And that’s all that life is: a bunch of journeys layered on top of each other and placed side by side stretching from birth to death. If you strip the significance from those journeys, you lose the meaning in your life.

I’m not saying that these drugs never have a place. But as a society, we’d be physically and spiritually healthier if we chose the slow, grinding path of pointing to where we want to go and owning the daily hardship it takes to get there. I can say with a certainty that comes from lived experience that if you step onto the path and walk it for long enough, you will no longer yearn for the destination that kickstarted your journey because you will have fallen in love with the day-to-day process of becoming.

VI.

The solution to this over-prescription crisis is adopting a high agency lifestyle: choosing to take responsibility for your life and, in doing so, making it uniquely your own.

To live with agency requires a basic level of in-touchness with yourself to first understand what you, as an N-of-1, want your life to look like. But it’s hard to figure out who you are and what you want if you live like a rock submerged under white water rapids, letting the noise of news and TV and social media drown you out while invisibly, but surely, eroding and shaping you.

Screens shepherd us into a passive existence of sitting and observing other people live. The human response to consuming online content is never a slow, sturdy sense of joy and fullness, but rather hollowness, jealousy, and malaise. Layer this not-enoughness with the fact that if we’re on a screen, we’re not doing the analog stuff that makes us feel good (exercise, sunlight, friends, cool hobbies, helping people, etc.), and it’s not surprising that more and more people are turning to drugs for quick solutions to focus, shed pounds, and relieve the anxiety or depression that their choices, or rather lack of conscious choices, created in the first place.

I struggle with all of these things and have friends and family who take medications for anxiety and focus. Our modern environment is not conducive to well-being. Screens target the same reward pathways in the brain as cocaine and heroine. They are designed to make you an addict. So quitting them is some of the hardest, but most rewarding, work you can do. Winning the digital war is a daily battle that will force you to cope with a lot of uncomfortable feelings from boredom to FOMO.

When you delete social media, you’ll miss out on group chats and your “friends’” latest Instagram posts. When you throw out the TV, you’ll fall out of touch with the latest series and face temporary boredom as you figure out how to spend the dozens of hours a week you used to spend zoned out in the undertow of a glowing screen. And when you quit doomscrolling the news, you’ll feel “uninformed” and “out of touch” with the world. But as time passes, you’ll realize that none of these things were improving your life. Social media wasn’t social. TV wasn’t relaxing or restorative. The news wasn’t making you more educated or worldly.

As the weeks go by, you’ll watch your friendships grow stronger because instead of passively observing their carefully cultivated life on Instagram, you’ll schedule time together to call and go for walks and grab coffee. Without a TV, you’ll discover skills, hobbies, friendships, and interests that would have never been revealed to you if your evenings were filled with shows. And you’ll realize the news never provided you with actionable, life-enriching information but rather just hijacked your brain with the worst things that happened in the world today. As you gain distance, you’ll become less involved in this weird online world, and more rooted in your real-life in-person community. These changes will be extremely uncomfortable and will force you and your relationships to evolve, but it’s a worthwhile fight.

Over years of living in this way, the wedge of agency will drive your life so far away from the default way of living that you won’t recognize your former self. You will have acquired skills, hobbies, friends, and tastes, and discovered a new depth to your most important relationships that would have been left unearthed had you spent those years in front of a screen. And your mood, attention, and weight will manage themselves.

No matter how hard it is to ditch your online additions to live in a more analog way, the most compelling reason to change is how much life you’re leaving unlived if you don’t.

It would be a tragedy to realize when it’s too late that you spent too many evenings shoulder to shoulder with your partner on the couch, and not enough on your hands and knees in the garden, chasing your kids through the rain, reading books that break and open and mend your heart or, in whatever way that calls you, building an unmedicated life that is unmistakably your own.

With love and humility,

If you enjoyed this essay, please consider subscribing:

Subscribe now

I’ve been wrestling with what it means to be confident.

There are a lot of skewed images of what a confident man is, stereotypically culminating in my mind as a James Bond archetype… smart, secure, and smooth with women, of course. Bond is a cool character, and the Daniel Craig films rock, but he’s only confident because he’s being, albeit unrealistically, himself. If I tried to chase the James Bond image of confidence, I’d be an awkward, repelling mess.

The main issue men who confront their confidence face is that they try to embody an archetype of confidence based on movies or social media. Sometimes this results in bravado-filled overconfidence (i.e., picking fights in bars, an irreparable case of Invisible Lat Syndrome (ILS), etc.) but mostly it makes you say and do stuff you later cringe at lying in bed at night.

This archetypal imitation strategy quickly deters people.

I spent a lot of elementary school trying to be accepted into social groups, which usually left me feeling like an outsider. But in odd moments when I let my guard slip and acted like my genuine self, I’d often say something funny or do something cool that was well received by the people I was trying to impress. People liked me more than my imposter. The social warzone of elementary school taught me that people are good at detecting inauthenticity, and inauthentic people are an immediate turnoff.

This is an unspoken universal truth. People will gravitate towards you if you’re genuine, regardless of what genuine you looks like. If someone doesn’t vibe with genuine you, they may not befriend you, but they’ll still respect and admire you for being you.

That’s why I believe self-assuredness is a better aim than confidence.

The self-assured person says what they believe and does so in a way that feels natural, without glancing at their audience in search of validatory nods. They don’t tailor themselves in false attempts to appease their audience. Confidence is not archetypal. It’s not James Bond or LeBron James. Confidence is merely responding to the world in a way that feels natural and true to you.

There’s a saying that courage is taking action despite feeling scared. Logic being, there’s no courage without fear. It’s the same idea with confidence. Daily in-the-trenches confidence is self-assuredness in the presence of self-doubt.

I don’t know how to work the rest of my thoughts on confidence into cohesive, non-rambling paragraphs. So here are the rest of my best ideas on confidence:

• Confidence is often unspoken.

• Be more humble and you’ll be more confident.

• Confidence is when the outside matches the inside.

• Never pretend. The self-assured person admits what they don’t know.

• Aim for egoless confidence. That is, confidence detached from identity.

• A lack of confidence is like having a lot of money in the bank but not being able to access it1.

• Self-assurance is saying and doing what you believe without chameleoning yourself in an attempt to impress your audience.

• A confident person is just someone who is comfortable with who they are and who doesn’t try to be someone else in public.

• Embrace your category of one. Confident people admire and are inspired by others, but they don’t compare themselves against them or try to imitate them.

• The fitter, more educated/skilled, and more prepared you are, the more confident you’ll be. So, spend your free time doing challenging and interesting things.

• To be self-assured, you gotta know your beliefs and values and what you stand for. Getting out into the world and doing things, then coming back into your head and reading and writing, helps you figure that out.

I try to live these things out, but I fail and stumble more than my ego enjoys admitting. I hope these ideas are helpful to you, but I’d also love to hear in the comments what I missed or what I’m wrong about.

Leave a comment

Big love,

In other news…

I got my jiu jitsu blue belt! This means I’m not a complete beginner but still suck compared to intermediate (purple belt) advanced (brown and black belt) practitioners.

Something I wrote down after receiving the belt: I’ve put a lot of time into developing this skill (approx. 500 hours on the mats), yet somehow the journey has only just begun. I believe the crafts worth pursuing in life are the ones you will never stop honing but can never fully master.

I finished my tattoo sleeve! This is something I’ve wanted to finish since high school, so it’s cool to get it done. I got my first tattoo in 2019, then another in 2024. Then I started jiu jitsu and met the artist who has since tattooed most of my arm. Awesome dude and an amazing artist. If you’re in Toronto and are looking for a great artist, check out @nightowldrawings.

Subscribe for new essays every month(ish):

Subscribe now

Warm light bled from restaurant windows lining Dundas Street in Toronto’s Chinatown, illuminating the evening sidewalk. It was an unusually mild January night, and I was walking to a pub to meet a friend I hadn’t seen since university.

A homeless man with the hood of his winter jacket pulled down over his eyes began walking beside me. He was Chinese, probably in his thirties, though he looked decades older. A wispy white Fu Manchu moustache framed his mouth, which held less than a full set of gray and yellow teeth jutting in different directions.

He was sniffling and hunched over as he approached me. I felt my heart rate rise into my throat and my fists tighten. Walking half a pace behind to my left side, he started speaking. Stammering. Stuttering. Asking me to buy him food. He spoke fast, his words tied together by an unmistakable undertone of fear that he would be rejected again.

Suddenly, he dropped off. He was no longer walking beside me. I walked ten more metres then paused to look back.

He was prostrate on the ground. Bowing to me on his hands and knees, his forehead pressed into the grimy sidewalk. Begging me, a stranger, to buy him food.

He looked up and saw me ahead, staring back at him. In one of those brief feeling-not-thinking instinctual moments that shape our lives, I waved him towards me, “Okay, let’s buy you some food. Anything close by you like?” “The H-h-house o-o-of G-g-ourmet” he stuttered as he pointed across the intersection. We crossed the street and he led me inside a Chinese restaurant with glistening brown Peking duck and crispy braised pork ribs hanging on meat hooks in the glowing window.

He ordered. I paid.

As I walked out, leaving him to wait for his food, he stuck out his hand to shake mine. His hand was bloody and dirty, sickly looking. I ignored it wordlessly and walked out of the restaurant, shame washing over me as the crisp January air enveloped me once again.

I felt conflicted about sharing this story because a heart in the right place does not share about its own good deeds.

But to be clear, my charity track record is not good. Buying this man a meal was the biggest donation I’ve made in months. If you added up my giving for the last year, it would equate to less than ten cents a day. I’m not writing this for praise. If anything, I should be chastised for my selfishness.

I wrote this because I’m flawed but trying to be better.

After leaving the restaurant, I didn’t feel good about what I did. I felt strangely conflicted. My heart hadn’t been in the right place. I didn’t give out of love or mercy or kindness. I gave out of pity. Or perhaps selfishness that I would feel guilty if I didn’t help a man so in need that he was prostrating himself to strangers on the street for a meal.

The outcome was the same, no matter how I felt about it. But my intention was wrong. If I had been intentional in this story, I would have sought out someone in need to give to. I would carry cash in my pocket to give to a few hungry people each week. I would have helped this man with an open heart, asking his story and wishing him well as I left. Instead, I gave reactively and treated this man as below human, dodging his handshake without eye contact or explanation.

I share this because I’m trying to bring intentionality in all that I do to the centre of my days in 2026. For me, being intentional means turning off autopilot and guiding my days manually. Stepping onto the jiu jitsu mats with a focus for each training session. Walking into the office with a vision for the skills I want to build and the work I want to engage with. Eliminating podcasts and TV to spend more time with my own thoughts and in meaningful conversation with the people who are important to me.

And, as I was reminded as I left The House of Gourmet in Chinatown that night, doing things on autopilot is not the same as doing them with intention, even if the outcomes look the same. Because autopilot devoids your days of meaning, while intention makes the life you’ve lived yours.

With love,

Subscribe for new stories every month:

Subscribe now

It was early October and my dad and I were headed west for a road trip through the ragged mountains that straddled the border of Alberta and British Columbia. Naturally, I was fixated on optimizing our trip which meant capitalizing on the famous golden larch season.

Larches are a unique breed of tree called deciduous conifers that can grow as tall as 60 metres. While they look like your average evergreen in the summer, their needles turn a brilliant golden colour for a few days in autumn before dropping.

If I found the right hike, we could expect to crescendo a mountain pass to look down on a valley of golden larches speckling the mountainsides sloping down to an emerald glacier-fed lake.

I searched for the perfect hike, and I found it.

Golden larches. Snow capped mountain peaks. Emerald lakes. This hike had it all.

Except because of the popularity of the area, Parks Canada controlled access to it. The 11-kilometre road that led to the trailhead was only accessible on foot or by a shuttle that you had to pre-book months in advance. It was the optimal hike in every way imaginable, which is why everyone wanted to do it. In the end, it was too optimal to access.

Rather than continuing to torture myself trying to find the best hikes, I conceded.

We decided that we would wake up each morning and, over coffee, spontaneously find a hike that made sense for that day.

My philosophy shifted from seeing optimal as a popular picture-perfect hike to seeing optimal as a still-beautiful hike, but a less popular one that didn’t carry the hassle of crowded trailheads and impossible parking.

We chose unoptimized enjoyment.

We always want the best.

I’ve seen it countless times in my world travels and at home in Toronto. Everyone vying, shoving, and shouting to get the best for them and theirs, often at the expense of others.

But trying to get the best comes at the sacrifice of our peace. Because getting the best means competing with other people for it, and that means rushing and fighting to get our piece of the limited pie.

We’re also bad judges of what the best is.

Usually, we just follow others and compete for what everyone else is competing for because we assume it’s the best.

I remember walking by a famous sandwich shop in Florence that had a lineup down the street. My girlfriend and I laughed and got a sandwich at the zero-line place across the way. We sat outside in peace eating our suboptimal sandwiches while observing the buffoons spending half their day in a sandwich line.

Then we peacefully and happily carried on with our day.

Another moment of unoptimized enjoyment.

In a world where we’re all aiming for optimal, the best, there is something to be said for seeking good. Often, good is better than the best because it’s still good without the hassle and stress that comes with the best.

This applies to our vacation plans, but has useful applications to other important areas of our lives such as fitness and finances.

Say you find an exercise program that you enjoy, but your beefhead buddy keeps riffing on the imperfections of your workouts. You’re far better off sticking to what you enjoy and can consistently do rather than straying into the dark and deep waters of optimized perfection.

Or with your finances, it’s better to find the risk level you’re comfortable with and stick to that strategy over the long-term rather than listening to an advisor who promises the highest returns with uncertainty that would cause you psychological ruin.

The key skill here is critical independent thought.

Figure out what good means to you and don’t get swept up in the flock of sheep chasing unattainable optimization.

That’s what I call unoptimized enjoyment.

And it can still look pretty damn good…

With love,

Subscribe for new stories every month:

Subscribe now

Curled up on the couch, my girlfriend pulled a blanket over her head as a Pagan Priest slit the forearms of a Viking from elbow to wrist.

Blood poured from his arms and trickled into copper bowls below.

As the Viking took his final breaths, the Priest lifted a bowl to his mouth and drank the blood while looking up to the heavens, asking Odin to ensure the victory of their clan in an upcoming battle.

We were watching the show Vikings Valhalla on Netflix.

The Viking had volunteered to be sacrificed. His tribe was going to war, and they believed that sending a messenger to the gods to ask for support, by way of sacrifice, would improve their odds of victory on the battlefield.

The man who sacrificed himself wasn’t coerced or forced. He saw his sacrifice as a valiant and valuable way to depart Earth. After all, upon his death he would rejoice with the gods and his deceased loved ones in Valhalla. And those who witnessed the sacrifice didn’t label the Priest as a murderer, but as a portal to the omnipotent.

Today, we laugh and label those beliefs and the sacrifice that stemmed from them as crazy, immoral, or perverse. But for those people at that time, assuming this scene had some degree of historical accuracy, those beliefs were real.

Call it placebo, but if a firmly held belief delivers feelings of hope, brightness, and optimism, then it is real.

Watching this scene prompted me to think of faith.

Simply put, faith is belief without evidence.

What struck me while watching this Viking sacrifice was the power our faith has over us. We all walk through life with beliefs that lack evidence. Most are subconscious and, if asked, we’d struggle to identify, label, or justify them. We often only find out what we stand for when it’s challenged. And I believe that everyone has enough faith in something that they’d be willing to die for it.

More, we see our beliefs as capital-T True. We think we walk on a ground of solid, evidence-backed beliefs. This is a deception. Nearly all our beliefs are acts of faith.

This is clearly demonstrated by the energy Westerners waste debating political beliefs. The best-case scenario of sharing your political beliefs is the rah-rah affirmation of others who already agree with you. The worst-case is arguing with people who will never agree with you, as you slowly become more hooked on the feeling of being riled up and angry.

But no matter where your political beliefs lie, they are based on faith. You can’t prove you’re right. This applies to most domains. It’s impossible to prove your beliefs are right, yet you believe them anyway.

Part of the problem is that we have become a society addicted to Truth.

We think our faith must be placed in things that are irrevocably true.

Truth is good and should be our pursuit in disciplines where one Truth exists. But the problem with Truth is that, apart from a handful of scientific principles such as gravity, thermodynamics, and the like, it doesn’t really exist.

If we’re talking about Truth on any topic that is not provable by science, whose Truth are we talking about? My Truth? Your Truth? Their Truth?

In most domains, Truth is subjective.

Even scientific Truths are only true until proven otherwise. And science still requires a level of faith in the people who untangled the universe into mathematical equations and physics formulas.

The writer and entrepreneur Derek Sivers has an idea, “Useful Not True.” He even published a book on it. The basic idea is that people share perspectives, not facts. Pretty much everything is up for debate.

So, you get to decide and define your Truth. Your Belief. Your Faith.

Then life will be the judge of whether you choose right.

Reality has a way of teaching harsh lessons to those who misplace their faith. For example, if I develop the belief that people are only useful to me to the extent that I can use them to obtain my own self-interests, I will quickly end up alone and with no meaningful relationships. That is a wrong belief, and the world will punish me for it.

Conversely, I have the agency to place my faith in the right beliefs that will give me a solid foundation for a courageous and loving life.

Perhaps because of its extremity, death struck me as another good example of how our beliefs can embolden or fragment us.

Since our society today is largely secular, the prevailing belief is that we are here by luck and once we die, we will return to the same nothingness that existed before we were born. This makes me pretty sad.

Compare this to the belief that when we die, we are reunited with our loved ancestors that have already passed away and will rejoice with our living loved ones when their time comes. This makes me feel much better.

I don’t see myself as religious, and my point isn’t to compare religious beliefs to secular beliefs. But put plainly with religion removed, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn’t cope with death better if they held the second belief, even if they still identified as agnostic.

You get to choose your beliefs. And those beliefs don’t have to be scientifically true. Rather, they can be acts of faith. But if you pick the right beliefs and believe them with your whole heart, you can live from a more solid foundation and draw from a well of boldness and love you couldn’t have otherwise.

With love,

Subscribe for new essays every month:

Subscribe now

Last week, my workers’ union reached a new agreement.

The settlement boasted “enhanced mental health supports” with nearly double the amount for psychological services. The do-good intention is there, yet I can help but feel like this is like putting a band-aid on a freshly severed arm.

We aren’t in a global mental health crisis because of a lack of mental health support, but because we are becoming an increasingly sick society. And like all the shoulder pads and helmets in the world won’t protect you from a fall off the top of the CN Tower, all the mental health support you can get your hands on won’t fix the cause of our societal sickness.

I’m not here to say I have all the solutions. But I can see the problems.

We spend more of our lives with coworkers than with our family. Rather than coming up for a breath of fresh air, we fill the cracks in our day with social media scrolling. We don’t move our bodies enough or spend enough time under the sky and the sun. We don’t belong to meaningful communities. We’ve made ourselves the most important thing in our lives, and so we self-centeredly worship and prioritize ourselves, rather than being of service to others.

Yet instead of seeking real solutions, we put our hands to the sky and pray to pills and psychotherapy. I don’t mean to bash those things – they are essential for some and can be helpful to others.

But while these tools can be catalysts for positive change, they will never be enough to make sustainable improvements to our lives. Popping pills and attending therapy while changing nothing else won’t fix our problems. Mental well-being can’t be outsourced to a prescription or psychologist.

I think the popularization of pills and therapy as ways to wellbeing stems from our desire to seek the easiest path forward while forgoing any real accountability.

These symptoms stem from greater societal trends of instant gratification, inability to commit, and a lack of willingness to bear responsibility.

I can’t walk down the street to my gym without nearly being run over by fifty different e-bike Uber Eats drivers. Nothing screams laziness, loss of connection, outsourcing of responsibility, and immediate gratification more than the store-to-door delivery epidemic.

And our collective lack of willingness to commitment — to people, places, and communities — is greater than it’s ever been. We all seem to fear getting tied down, when paradoxically, tying ourselves to people, places, and things is the only path to true liberation and freedom.

The solution to these problems will not come from some grand societal shift, but rather from small individual choices.

As individuals, we must decide to seek responsibility and savour solutions that take time. To tie ourselves to someone and some place. To stop scrolling and go to sleep. To wake up early and find ways to move our bodies and nurture our minds. To spend less time under a roof and more under the sky. To go places Wi-Fi routers won’t reach. To entrench ourselves in and contribute to a community. To prioritize an authentic and enjoyable life over status and money.

Real problems are hard. And though this isn’t a popular narrative in today’s quick-fix culture, real solutions are hard too.

A big part of mental well-being comes down to choosing your hard.

If you choose the easy fix, you’ll have hard problems that never go away. But if you opt for hard, temporarily uncomfortable solutions, the rest of your life will feel easy and enjoyable.

With love,

Subscribe for new essays every month:

Subscribe now

The heat radiating down from the summer sun and up our bodies was trapped under the tent’s rain cover, turning it into a humid sauna. Even lying still, sweat trickled from every pore of my body. When the chorus of frogs that lived in the lake beside us began their raucous croaking, the notion of getting any sleep diminished into a hopeful fantasy.

Yet we couldn’t stop laughing.

I shouted to my friend, who was alone in a tent ten feet away from us, “How’s the temperature over there?”

He replied: “Which one of you guys installed AC in my tent?”

Our laughter amplified. It was our coping strategy to accept the inescapable discomfort of the night ahead.

It was 8 p.m. on a July Saturday night and we were tucked into our tents, ready for an early bedtime in the middle of Algonquin Provincial Park’s backcountry. Over the past two days, we endured long hikes with heavy packs in hot, humid weather, under the constant assault of mosquitoes and deer flies.

And though we were in for a long, restless sleep, we went to bed all smiles and laughs.

We woke the next morning groggy and under-rested, fourteen hundred frogs still croaking at full force. After packing up camp and draining a quick coffee while gazing at the sun’s reflection on the glasslike lake, we shouldered our packs and hiked back to civilization.

During the hike back to the car, my friend reflected that this trip, his first backcountry hiking adventure, was the hardest thing he had ever done.

Backcountry camping is an extended period of feeling constantly uncomfortable.

You’re grimy and sweaty. You’d rather stand around the campfire because it’s strangely more comfortable than the notion of sitting on yet another rock or log. Bugs attack you constantly, buzzing in your ears and biting through your clothes. You wake in the morning to discover new levels of muscle stiffness stemming from sleeping on the ground and hiking long distances with heavy packs.

And between organizing camp, packing and unpacking, making food and cleaning up, there is always work to be done. Even the most trivial tasks, like filling your bottle with clean drinking water, turn into a ten-minute affair. When idle moments do arise, boredom sets in. With no smartphones or internet, you’re left with nothing to do but be with your thoughts and enjoy the forest around you.

It offers a stark contrast to our ultra-comfortable modern lives. All the tasks that are done with ease at home take considerable effort and strain in the backcountry.

My friend asked me why I do these trips.

I have many reasons, but one of the most important is the way the backcountry forces my character to develop. Between the bugs, heat, dirt, constant work, soreness, lack of sleep, and all the other forms of discomfort backcountry camping imposes on you, these trips wear me down.

And the only way to figure out who I really am, to see what’s under the polished exterior I present in the untested comfort of my day-to-day, is to see who I am when I’m worn thin.

The ability to laugh in the face of hardship and discomfort is a power that can only be developed through lived experience. In the face of a challenge, you can cry, complain, and get frustrated, or laugh, keep it light, and forge a way forward.

Every backcountry camping trip I go on, I get better at doing the latter.

With love,

Subscribe for new essays every month:

Subscribe now

Like a slowly steeping tea, irritation infused further into our voices.

We threw the map back and forth—from the bow of the canoe to the stern—pointing at the jagged coastline and arguing over our orientation in Ragged Lake.

It was midday at the start of May.

My brother, Tommy, and I were in Algonquin Provincial Park on our first ever portage trip—a backcountry camping trip in which you paddle across lakes and carry your canoe over land to travel between waterways.

More familiar with footpaths and new to navigating waters, we hadn’t taken the necessary time to plot a nautical route before launching our canoe into Ragged Lake.

So we ended up not in South Bay, where our next portage was, but adrift in West Bay, disoriented and headed further off course.

Two bald eagles soared in semi-circles overhead, seemingly snickering at another pair of lost paddlers. No matter which way we cocked our heads or turned the map, we couldn’t figure out if the large island punctuating the middle of the lake was in front, behind, or to the side of us.

Bears, wolves, and mountain lions are barely a concern in the backcountry in contrast to the trouble your own ignorance can get you in.

By far, the biggest danger in the woods is going off course and losing all sense of direction.

And we had committed that cardinal sin.

We were lost.

Swirling in my mind as we tried to decipher the map and make sense of the land around us was one last resort I was hoping we wouldn’t become desperate enough to use.

But as the fear of being lost in 8,000 square kilometres of wilderness found its way into the marrow of my bones, I caved.

I muttered to my brother from the back of the canoe, “I’m going to turn on my phone, I might have downloaded offline maps for this area.” As I spoke the words, my aspiring self-image as a weathered woodsman splintered to woodchips inside me.

I unclipped my burnt red 80-litre pack, pulled out the blue waterproof sack stowing our valuables, and turned on my phone.

As a white Apple illuminated the black screen, I murmured a quick prayer that my fuzzy memory of downloading offline maps for all of Ontario wasn’t just a mid-lake delusion.

My phone buzzed to life. No signal, as expected.

My slightly trembling fingers fumbled to Google Maps. I opened the app to an all blue screen. Five seconds passed. Still blue.

I scanned the lake, realizing we might be left to resolve this on our own.

When I looked back down, maps had booted up and a blue beacon showed our pinpointed location. Every muscle in my body that had unconsciously tightened over the preceding minutes relaxed.

We had unknowingly hugged the island for too long, overshooting our turn by twenty minutes.

If Tommy hadn’t had the hunch to check our direction, we could have found ourselves paddling in the dark that night trying to make camp.

With three big backstrokes, I turned us around, pointing the canoe back the way we came. The bald eagles swooped overhead as if seeing us out of their home.

Forty minutes later, we found our portage where the shore met marsh at the narrowing southern end of the lake.

I have a tendency to take things to the extreme.

This helps me in some areas of life.

It enables me to train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for eight hours a week on top of hour-long workouts every morning.

But it hurts me in others.

I grit my teeth and keep training through arthritic-feeling elbows and an unstable shoulder that’s come close to dislocation more times than I care to count. I know I’ll pay the price later, but I can’t convince myself to rest.

I’ve tried to adopt the motto of “less but better,”1 but the root of me can’t stop living by the slogan, "more is best.”

Doing more is part of my personality.

Downloading offline maps for all of Ontario despite the fact I spend 99% of my time in Toronto is an extension of the part of my character that takes things to the extreme.

If I was pragmatic, I wouldn’t have bothered saving maps for anything outside of the city and its surrounding suburbs. But the part of me that needs to do more urged me, years ago on a day I don’t remember, to spend storage space on offline maps for places I’ll probably never go.

And when we were lost floating in the middle of a remote lake, that part of me saved us.

It may seem like I’m tugging on the thread of a faint connection, but I don’t think it is. At least no more faint than the feelings that tug at us each day that make us us. Many of those feelings may be completely subconscious, or hard to put words to, but they compose our character.

I don’t know why my character, with all its weirdness, intricacies, and preferences, is the way it is.

My propensity to take things to an unnecessary extreme probably stems from childhood feelings of inadequacy that I unknowingly compensated for by always doing more than is necessary.

But if that’s who I am, why not lean into it?

Embrace it?

See it as a strength instead of a deficiency?

Rather than incessantly ironing out my kinks, as some modern-day therapists or self-improvement gurus might suggest, I’d rather embrace the tendencies that make me me.

And I’m learning to listen more.

To listen to the threads that tug at my heart, pulling me in the direction of my character, no matter how nonsensical it may be to the rest of the world.

With love,

Subscribe for new essays every month:

Subscribe now

In other news…

I’m back. I missed writing. I plan to start publishing once a month.

Thank you for being here 🤙🏼

“If a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.”

― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Since starting jiu jitsu nearly five months ago, I’ve been injured four times.

First a strained rib. Then a knee to the head which bruised my eyeball, making it painful to look around for a week. Next was a tweaked and immobilized shoulder. And now I’m managing the beginnings of cauliflower ear which is making me look far more scary than I am competent at fighting.

My initial reaction to these injuries was that of a toddler given a toy-less timeout. Whining. Saying, to no one in particular, that it’s not fair. Murmuring “why me?”

Injuries, like sickness, take you out of your body. As a highly kinetic person, I need movement to feel like myself. Taking my training away feels like stripping a tree of its bark.

My sleep was restless the night after sustaining each injury. I couldn’t shut my brain off from pondering how long I’d be sidelined. Tossing in bed, I was mad at myself for getting hurt and upset I’d have to miss training sessions.

Upon waking, I had gained some emotional distance. I saw two paths. Continue feeling sorry for myself. Or step back and ask what each injury is trying to teach me.

The circumstance I was in, nursing injuries with uncertain recovery timelines, had no value on its own. Value is not inherent, it’s assigned entirely by us. And how I chose to relate to my situation was entirely up to me.

So rather than dwelling in my despair, I looked for the lessons in each injury. Doing so transformed my situation from the victim of unfortunate events to the master of my circumstance.

Events are meaningless on their own. Meaning lives in the story we tell ourselves about the situation we’re in.

And that choice is always ours.

With love,

Subscribe now

P.S. What did I learn from these injuries? Here’s what I came up with in my journal:

• Be tougher.

• Press on despite momentary setbacks.

• There are always worse ways to suffer.

• Embrace challenge, struggle, and hardship.

• Sometimes the answer is to stop hammering and rest more.

• Hard times make you tougher and wiser if you deal with them right.

• Stop taking your health for granted. Be grateful each day you feel healthy and strong.

• Diversify your identity. Don’t allow your identity to become wrapped up in any one thing. Besides family, nothing matters that much.

• A strong mind and body bear suffering better. Stay healthy and condition your mind to be strong so you can handle adversity when it comes.

• Prevention is primary. You want to be active and train hard your whole life. Put yourself in your 60-year-old-you shoes, because that day is coming.

• Slow down, stop rushing the process of development, and enjoy the journey. The process is all there is. The road never ends.

P.P.S. None of these injuries kept me off the mats or out of the gym for more than four days at a time. I had to dial back the intensity, but I kept showing up to train as the injuries were healing.

I’m sorry that I haven’t written you since August.

There have been times when I wanted to. And more times I’ve felt twinges of regret for not writing. But I just haven’t had the time. I’ve been busy.

Busy, living.

After being voluntarily unemployed for 14 months, the job I started in October took me from a cottage in the country to a condo in the city. As I entered this new phase of life, I knew my schedule would need some major surgery.

I would no longer be able to afford an hour of pre-dawn journalling and reading or focused four-hour writing sessions. Nor would I be able to hit 11am workouts followed by lake swims and mid-afternoon meals.

In my unemployment, I could make it rain seconds and minutes and hours. But with this new thing called a job, I would no longer be a time millionaire. No, things would need to change.

Writing was an essential daily activity for nearly 3 years of my life. But the cost of continuing to write became too great. As a knowledge worker, I spend at least 37 hours per week sitting, hammering away on a keyboard. To keep publishing here, for you, would be to spend another 5 to 10 hours a week doing the same thing on a different laptop.

To continue writing would be to spend too much of my life sitting sedentary on a screen. The opportunity cost of writing – spending my free time digitally engaged rather than engaged in the real living breathing world – was just too high.

So I made the hard decision to put writing on pause.

With the time I reclaimed from the digital underworld, I started training Brazilian jiu-jitsu 5 to 7 times per week. The combination of cognitive engagement, physical movement, and real-time feedback that jiu-jitsu delivers scratches my brain in just the right way. It’s extremely addictive, even as a sucky beginner.

Though I miss writing, I’m proud of myself for removing it from my routine.

You see, I have an excessively thick skull and this is the first time in my life I’ve successfully followed an important rule: you cannot infinitely add to your life without first subtracting.

Before adding something new, something old must be removed. Often, that means removing something good for something great. Or removing one great thing to add something equally great because it better fits the current season of your life.

For me, in this season, adding a job and jiu-jitsu meant removing writing.

I’ll still write you when I can, I promise. Just on a sporadic schedule. And anything I send you will be as worth your time as I can make it.

From Toronto with Love,

Jack

Life in Pictures

140 straight weeks of publishing.

Countless hours spent writing and rewriting.

And now I’m taking a break.

Writing has felt like a slog for the last eight weeks. I’ve shown up and pushed through. Grinded out drafts. Published anyway. There’s a time for that, for forging ahead despite challenge.

But now it’s time to step back and reflect.

The end of summer is near and I’m in the middle of a job hunt. After applying to jobs every day for eleven weeks and hearing nothing back, I’m finally starting to get some interviews. There’s a chance that none of them pan out and I’m back to applying. But I want to throw myself fully at this career search until I land something.

I also want to spend less time digitally engaged.

Writing on my laptop isn’t the same as scrolling Instagram or binging Netflix, but it’s still screen time. Writing is a valuable practice, one that will always be part of my life, but it strips away time I could spend living in the real world.

After writing almost every day for nearly 1,000 days, I think there’s value in taking a break. When I return to writing, I know it will be for the right reasons and with the right intentions, not because of a stubbornness to keep my streak going or out of fear my subscriber count could drop. Letting myself take a break from the grind of publishing every week will also relieve some pressure. It will let me write for the joy of it, not to meet another weekly deadline.

I don’t know when I’ll publish again. Maybe in a week. Maybe in a month. And I don’t know what cadence I’ll adopt. Maybe I’ll publish something next week then not again for another month.

But I still have lots of ideas to share and I hope you’ll be here to read them when I do.

With all my love,

Subscribe for new essays (once I start publishing again!):

Subscribe now

The last few weeks:

Thanks for reading!

1 — Leave a like. I’d be grateful if you’d consider tapping the “heart” ❤️ at the top or bottom of this page.

2 — Let’s chat. If you want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear from you and I respond to everyone!

Leave a comment

3 — Share the love. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

P.S. If you want to reach me directly, you can respond to this email or message me on Substack Chat.

Last week, my mom taught me that we don’t need dryer sheets.

Those big reusable wool dryer balls remove the static from our clothes just fine as they tumble round. Other than being unnecessary, dryer sheets can damage our clothes and drying machines over time because of the thin waxy film they leave behind.1

Then she mentioned how laundry companies also tell us how much soap to use. The caps on big jugs of detergent have a Fill line to indicate how much soap you should add to the washing machine. I always used that much without questioning it. “But we don’t need that much,” she continued. “They want us to use more than we need so we burn through soap quickly and come back to buy more.”

With these two seemingly small revelations, I was exposed to my own naïveté.

I wasn’t asking enough questions. I had foolishly never even thought about asking those questions. I trusted the word of companies who profit from those who follow their labels without hesitation. When companies make decisions for us, we should question them ruthlessly. And that which we have never thought about questioning is what we most need to question.

~~~

Most companies don’t care about the individual consumer.

I’m part of a target consumer, an archetype defined by demographics, that buys or that they want to buy their stuff. So are you. The impact their product has on our health, wallet, or world is not of concern. As long as it adds to their bottom line, it’s a good product.2

Food companies regularly sub out ingredients in their products for cheaper but worse alternatives.

Palm oil is dirt cheap. It’s flavourless and colourless once refined. Its production can be ecologically disastrous, leading to deforestation and other environmental implications. And if you’re concerned for your health, you probably want to avoid consuming much of it.

Yet it finds its way into both our cosmetic and food products.

It’s in our soap, deodorant, sunscreen, and about half of the packaged products in grocery stores. And it’s often secretly masqueraded on packaging as one of its derivatives: Vitamin A palmitate, Palmitoyl tetrapeptide-3, Glycerin, Cocamidopropyl betaine, Stearic acid, Palmate, Palm kernel oil, Magnesium stearate, Sucrose oleate, Sodium palm kernelate, Sodium lauryl sulfate, Decyl glucoside.3

So even if you’re trying to avoid palm oil, you’ll have a tough time figuring out which of your products it’s in.

~~~

It’s easy to slip through life without asking questions of the regular everyday things that happen right under your nose. 

I’m trying to pay more attention. Examine all of the things I engage with regularly, whether it be a product I buy or a service I use, and ask more questions of them. And when it makes sense, I’m finding my own way rather than following convention.

Baking bread at home rather than buying the crap in stores that’s pumped with oils and additives.

Passing up on dryer sheets and figuring out how much soap I actually need to add to the washing machine.

Doubting if the positive health impact of AG1 is as substantial as every paid podcaster says it is and just eating vegetables instead.

Asking more questions where I’ve never asked questions before, trusting myself more than big companies and bought-off influencers, and walking the path that makes sense to me rather than the one I’m being told to walk.

With love,

Subscribe for new essays every Thursday:

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading!

1 — Leave a like. I’d be grateful if you’d consider tapping the “heart” ❤️ at the top or bottom of this page.

2 — Let’s chat. If this resonates or you want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear from you and I respond to everyone!

Leave a comment

3 — Share the love. If you know someone who may enjoy reading this, please share it with them.

Share

P.S. If you want to reach me directly, you can respond to this email or message me on Substack Chat.

1. In-person Instagram

2. Killing Google

3. Cranium over calculator 

In-person Instagram

Show your pictures to actual people

I have a vision. 

A future for our camera rolls.

Imagine this…

What if we didn’t post Instagram pics to impress peripheral people? What if we didn’t need to present an image on Instagram to influence how others perceive us?

What if, instead, we did in-person Instagram?

We could come home from a trip or notable event, gather our families and real friends around the table at the end of a slow meal, and show them the pictures on our phones while telling them about the neat experience we had.

It would probably lead to laughter and conversation. It could even draw out memories and stories from your loved ones you had never heard before.

There would be no emoji replies nor fake comments that sound suave on the Internet. We’d eliminate the hollow feeling we get when something we post doesn’t hit the same number of likes and comments as our last post. 

Plus we could start snapping photos quickly instead of squandering the experience trying to take a perfectly postable pic.

Killing Google

Do stuff without checking Google first

I’m sick of googling everything before I do it.

Rather than just trying things and figuring things out, I consult Google on everything I do. There was a time when we didn’t have it and we used our brains to think things through. We experimented to figure out what works. We failed sometimes. But we learned from it. And we didn’t need to read blogs, how-to posts, and reviews for every little thing we did.

Instead of consulting Google, I’m going back to trying things in a way that makes sense to me.

Here’s a silly example…

Last week I had a bunch of bird’s eye chili peppers in the fridge that were about to go bad. Rather than letting them rot, I decided to turn them into chili flakes. I picked up my phone and started to Google how to do it. Then I paused, put down my phone in disgust, and thought “Are you really asking Google how to do this? Isn’t this something you could figure out by yourself?” 

So I experimented by following my intuition. I washed and minced the chilis, put them in the oven for a long time at a low temperature to dry them out, and checked them every fifteen minutes to make sure they didn’t burn. 

They turned out wonderfully…

Cranium over calculator

Use the body’s innate capabilities 

I noticed myself reaching for my phone too quickly for simple tasks that I’m capable of doing if I slow down and challenge myself to do them. 

Take basic mental math.

I can add, subtract, multiply, and divide most whole numbers if I stop and think for a moment. When I rely on my calculator too much, I start to lose my math abilities. Now I challenge my brain instead of reaching for my phone right away and I’m slowly getting sharper with numbers.

We can do the same with other tools on our phones like maps.

If I’m going somewhere, I’ll look at the directions once, try to memorize where the place is, and then find my way there without consulting the map at every intersection. 

I’ve even started using my flashlight less by taking a minute to let my vision become dark adapted.

All these things take a few more moments than reaching for the simple solution on my phone, but using my body’s faculties makes me feel more human and like I’m engaged with the real world, not a fake digital one.

Plus slowing down is one of the few real luxuries left in the modern world.

With love,

Subscribe for new essays every Thursday:

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading!

1 — Leave a like. I’d be grateful if you’d consider tapping the “heart” ❤️ at the top or bottom of this page.

2 — Let’s chat. If this resonates or you want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear from you and I respond to everyone!

Leave a comment

3 — Share the love. If you know someone who may enjoy reading this, please share it with them.

Share

P.S. If you want to reach me directly, you can respond to this email or message me on Substack Chat.

“Idle hands are the devil's tools.”

Camping is constant work.

From the moment I open my groggy eyes, lying unrested on the hard ground and being thankful it's not raining or miserable that it is, I’m busy at work. I start a fire for warmth and to smoke out the unceasing terror of mosquitos and deer flies. Then I unload and unpack boxes and crates from the car containing cookware, dishes, groceries, and everything else we need for breakfast.

Clutching as many water bottles and pots as I can carry, I amble a hundred meters to the closest water tap. Hoping the water is running and praying there’s no boil advisory, I fill up then stumble back to the site in short strides loaded down with water-filled containers.

I set up the stove and screw in the propane tank, a modern 19th-century camping luxury that allows you to have modifiable temperature rather than broiling everything, including the hair on the backs of your hands, over an increasingly hot fire. After thirty minutes of work, I finally have everything I need to cook breakfast for my company and a cup of coffee for myself.

With breakfast done, I return to the water tap and fill a wash basin. My fingers go numb as I try to clean dishes with frigid water that is intent on ensuring gunk and grime cement itself to plates and pans. With the cleaning done, I pack everything back into its crate or cooler and, with the poise of a Tetris champion, put the puzzle pieces back together in the car, ensuring nothing is left outside that would draw bears or other scavengers to the site. 

This whole cooking and cleaning routine is repeated two or three times per day, interspersed with searching the car for games, tarps, sunscreen, bug spray, toiletries, clothes, and the endless list of other things we use each day without realizing it unless you need to open a car door eighty-seven times per day to find it.

Between all of the work, so long as it’s not raining which will ruin your trip entirely unless you have one of those massive blue tarps and lots of rope and four trees positioned in a square on your campsite to string it up to, there’s time to swim, hike, play, and enjoy the beauty of the place you’re in.

~~~

To camp is to work and to play and to never stop moving for longer than fifteen minutes at a time.

Without many of the appliances we take for granted—fridges, running water, electricity, dishwashers, and so on—everything must be done manually. Electricity is gone without. Water is fetched from a well or lake. Dishes are washed by hand. Shelter is erected, fortified, and protected by you.

But strangely, the work feels good. It gives me something important to busy myself with. And, when I pause and look around, I can soak in the calm beauty of the forest around me.

At the end of the day, after having watched the blood-orange sun drop below an alpine-lined lake, we sit around the campfire and become transfixed in tales told over flickering flames. After a day of being constantly on my feet and using my hands, it feels good to sit down.

We brought technology into our homes that gives us more free time but strips us of the deserved feeling of resting after a hard day’s work. So we sit on the couch for Netflix two hours too early with too much energy left in our tanks.

And we feel more depressed because of it.

We are built to work. Work is energizing. Work provides direction. Work gives purpose. Leisure should still be taken. But it should be taken in much smaller sessions than we’re being sold.

Time spent on the sofa locked into something mindnumbing only feels good in short stretches when we’ve earned it.

With love,

Subscribe for new essays every Thursday:

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading!

1 — Leave a like. I’d be grateful if you’d consider tapping the “heart” ❤️ at the top or bottom of this page.

2 — Let’s chat. If this resonates or you want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear from you and I respond to everyone!

Leave a comment

3 — Share the love. If you know someone who may enjoy reading this, please share it with them.

Share

P.S. If you want to reach me directly, you can respond to this email or message me on Substack Chat.

Most weekdays, my workout begins with a seven-kilometre run on lonely country roads lined with rolling pastures of tall green cornstalks swaying with the wind and fields of cows grazing on dewy morning grass.

Two kilometres into my running route, I pass a long gravel driveway. It leads to a white-panelled house that sits alone on the crest of a small hill surrounded by fields. The farmer who lives in that house, Mr. Rea, is in his late seventies. He rises early each day, as he has for decades, and works with the tireless relent a farmer earns his living by.

One morning this summer, Mr. Rea was at the bottom of his driveway with a wheelbarrow of gravel doing patchwork. He was leaning on a shovel catching his breath when I ran into sight. I looked at him, smiled widely, and jovially shouted “Morning!”

Like the caged blades of an oscillating fan, his eyes locked with mine and his head slowly swivelled with me as I ran. His laser eyes looked me over with some combination of disdain and amusement and, after what felt like minutes, he jestfully replied, “You must have lots of extra energy, do ya.”

“Yes sir!” I said with a grin.

For the rest of my run, I thought about the generation Mr. Rea was from and how it had shaped him. Before he spoke, I already knew what he thought of running through the slanted angle of the suntanned wrinkles stacked on his forehead and the way the skin was pinched on the outside of his swirling turquoise eyes.

The idea of running for the sake of it and expending energy without doing purposeful work is nonsensical to him. He works hard when there is work to be done and rests when it’s time to rest.

His seemingly terse reaction had a kind honesty and charismatic bluntness to it. With little more than the expressions on his face and a few words, Mr. Rea had planted a thought in my head: You and I live on the same earth but we come from different worlds.

~~~

The world is like it’s never been before. 

The human experience we are living through today is the furthest removed it has ever been from the preceding 300,000 years of our species’ existence.1

To get a snapshot of how different our lives are from all of the generations before ours, let’s transport back in time 100 years, 0.03% of human existence, to the 1920s…

Students still used tablets made of slate. 

The first crossword puzzle was published.

Regular radio broadcasts were rising in popularity enabling people, for the first time, to tune into news and entertainment from around the world. 

The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which produced time clocks, became IBM. They didn’t create the world's first mass-produced computer until 1953, just 71 years ago. It weighed 5,400 pounds.2

Many grocery stores were mom-and-pop shops, much smaller and more limited in selection than what we have today. Butchers and produce vendors operated separately. Frozen foods and sliced bread were hot inventions. Six-packs of Coca-Cola hit the shelves.3

Cars were becoming more prevalent, and dangerous, but horses still did much of our transportation and agriculture work.

If you transported a middle-aged farmer from 1924 to 2024, their understanding of how the world works would crumble. If they didn’t end up in an insane asylum, convinced that the world was possessed by magic or God or some other preternatural force, they might explore innovations of the last century. They’d put down the first ever produced crossword puzzle and scroll Instagram. They’d ditch the radio and watch Netflix. They’d skip the local butcher shop and SkipTheDishes instead.

~~~

Innovation has pried our humanness from our fingertips. And you don’t need to go as far back as 100 years to see the impacts of technological transformation.

I’m 25. My grandparents were born in the mid-1930s and my parents in the mid-1960s.

It wasn’t until my grandfather was my age in the 1950s that TVs and washing machines entered homes in the masses.4 Cell phones didn’t become popular until he was in his mid-sixties.

My parent’s generation, born in a time where they adapted to technologies as they came, have felt the biggest change of all: from Rolodex to the Contacts app, typewriter to computer, paper maps to Google Maps, vinyl to Spotify, filing cabinets to the Cloud, encyclopedias to Wikipedia, libraries to electronic repositories, travel agents to travel apps, branch banking to mobile money sending, talking on phones to tapping on phones.

Everything we treat as normal today—wifi, driving, smartphones, earning a living with our minds instead of our bodies, being globally jealous over all the lives we aren’t living on social media, cheap unlimited access to hyper-palatable foods that only exist due to food engineering, unfettered access to drugs, alcohol, pornography, and news—is extremely modern and unnatural to the human experience 100 years ago, let alone 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 years ago when our circuitry was in its developmental stages. 

The pace of change and how it’s altered our humanness is staggering.

We act like what we are living in is normal to the human experience. But it’s not. The time we are in is so different and we are so unprepared to handle it.

~~~

With each innovation and technology we accepted, we made a tradeoff.

In exchange for lives of convenience, comfort, and ease and the elimination of boredom, we sacrificed that which fully utilizes our uniquely human traits: interactions with others and the activities, largely rooted in work and effort, that make us feel human.

But I’m optimistic. On the fringes, people are reclaiming their humanness.

Cooking and chatting with their families over an aromatic stovetop instead of ordering out. 

Deleting social media in rebellion of endless comparisons and false but unavoidable feelings of inadequacy.5

Travelling to take in the culture and talk to the locals without the compulsion to portray how lavish their lifestyle is through cool-captioned Instagram posts.

Opting to order their coffee from the counter with a cheery smile and a friendly hello rather than behind the blue glow of a smartphone screen. Then repeating these neighborly interactions at the local library and farmer’s market.

Ditching the news for its lack of usefulness and actionability and focusing instead on the people we pass and the communities that envelop us.

Abstaining from the mindnumbing grips of the Internet, the poison of modern food, and the despair of drugs to experience life in its raw sober beauty.

Modernity and all the technology that has come with it should have a place in our lives. But that place should be one of strict utility, not one that possesses our hearts and minds and eliminates the actions and interactions that make us feel human.

With love,

Subscribe for new essays every Thursday:

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading!

1 — Leave a like. I’d be grateful if you’d consider tapping the “heart” ❤️ at the top or bottom of this page.

2 — Let’s chat. If this resonates or you want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear from you and I respond to everyone!

Leave a comment

3 — Share the love. If you know someone who may enjoy reading this, please share it with them.

Share

P.S. If you want to reach me directly, you can respond to this email or message me on Substack Chat.

“They had no self-control, could not restrain

Themselves from wreaking outrages and pain

On one another, and counted among their vices

Neglect of the gods, the rightful sacrifices 

That men perform, as custom says they must;

And then Zeus hid these also in disgust

Because they would not give the gods their due.

And so the ground has covered this race too…”

— Works and Days, Hesiod (700 BC)

Origins of Sacrifice

For as long as humans have worshipped Gods, we have made sacrifices to appease them or to sway the course of nature in our favour.

Vedics surrendered cake, milk, animals, and soma-plant juice to their Gods.

Vikings sacrificed horses, dogs, hens, and humans to their Gods Odin, Thor, and Frey.

Ancient Greeks sacrificed cows, sheep, goats, pigs, birds, wine, and men to win over their Gods in times of disaster and war.1

To the non-religious observer, as I am, sacrificing something to an unseen power, especially when it involves death, seems like a cruel waste. But the significance of sacrifice isn’t in the addition of something to the realm of the Gods. It’s in the subtraction of something valuable from the giver and the loss and hardship that the one giving must endure.

The Gods commend our sweat, suffering, and hard work. They demand us to give something our human nature does not want to give, something painful, something that would be easier to keep tucked away inside us. In return, when we sacrifice something we would rather not, they reward us.

And not all sacrifice is religious.

In modern culture we worship movies and real-life events in which the soldier sacrifices his life for his country, the player sacrifices his body for his team, and the romantic sacrifices his heart for love.

We admire and are inspired by sacrifice.

What is Sacrifice?

I know I’m sacrificing when my knee-jerk reaction is avoidance.

Sacrifice feels like lightly wrapping your hand around a cactus. Except when you squeeze, when you fully commit to the sacrifice and expect the thorns to draw blood, the spiky spines disappear and all that’s left in your hand is the syrupy sweet cactus fruit.

Exercise is one of the sacrifices I make each day.

There is rarely a day when I’m excited to lace up my running shoes. But I do it anyway. And once I do, my mood is better, my brain is sharper, I’m fitter, and I might live longer. Exercise enables me to be the best version of myself and to serve those I love at my highest capacity.

Whether you prefer to sacrifice in the name of the Gods or the Universe or the nameless human element inside you that demands sacrifice is up to you. I’m not religious, but I like the idea of sacrificing to a greater cosmic power I don’t understand but that impacts my life every day: the Gods.

God to me isn’t El, Allah, Lord Buddha, Vishnu, or the Christian God.

God is the part of me I don’t understand but that exists nonetheless. God is the part of me that looks up at the night sky and cannot fathom that the matter that is me is stardust.2 God is the part of me that is being human in a way not so different than a ripple in the ocean is being a wave. God is all that is hidden from my sight and incomprehensible to my brain but that lives in the senses of my gut and my heart. God is wonder, awe, faith, and intangible wisdom.

Mood and Meaning

Though religion has died a swift death in the Western world, the need to sacrifice to avoid punishment and receive blessings is alive within us.3 

Our mood and meaning stem from the sacrifices we make. The size of the commitment within the sacrifice determines which one it impacts.

Sacrifices that require short commitments determine our mood. My mood is earned through the hard things I do every day that would be easier to avoid doing altogether. If I appease the Gods through hard exercise, proper and kind conduct, modest eating, honest work, and enough sleep, I will be bestowed the daily gift of feeling vital, light, and optimistic about life. 

Sacrifices that require long-lasting commitments create meaning in our lives. The parent sacrifices their time, money, and freedom to raise their child and is rewarded with purpose, personal growth, and profound unconditional love for another human being. The spouse sacrifices themselves as an individual to merge their lives in union as one with their partner and receives companionship, love, support, and shared experiences.

Non-Sacrificers are Punished

The alternative to sacrifice is self-centred selfishness. A lack of sacrifice implies a constant fixation on servicing only your needs. Refusing to sacrifice and instead serving only yourself, in big and small, is a path to ruin.

If I shirk the Gods through skipped workouts and kind acts gone undone, they will punish my laziness with misery, anxiety, and depression. My headspace will sour and my mood will plummet. And if I refuse to make sacrifices in the form of long-term commitments, my life will lack meaning.

Those who sacrifice nothing but instead indulge in each daily impulse—social media scrolling, gluttonous eating, sedentary living, and selfish acting—are punished.

They are given meaningless lives of suffering that manifest in a hellish headspace.

The Daily Grind

There is good and bad news:

Each day the battle must be fought anew.

If yesterday was squandered and the Gods punished you for your unwillingness to sacrifice, you can redeem yourself today through hard work and good conduct. 

But you cannot relent. All sacrifices, short or life-long in their commitment, take the form of small actions repeated daily.

Every morning, you start at zero. Yesterday is forgotten and the daily battles must be fought again. You have to lace up your running shoes, put your partner before you, crack open a book, throw the chips in the trash, inconvenience yourself in service of kind acts, and make other sacrifices to earn a mind of peace and positivity and a life of meaning.

Then when you wake up tomorrow, you have to do it all again.

Your mood and meaning must be earned. Sacrifice something from within yourself each day, then let the thanks of the Gods rain down upon you.

With love,

Subscribe for new essays every Thursday:

Subscribe now

Thank you to for your invaluable edits on the initial drafts of this piece.

Thanks for reading!

1 — Leave a like. I’d be grateful if you’d consider tapping the “heart” ❤️ at the top or bottom of this page.

2 — Let’s chat. If this resonates or you want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear from you and I respond to everyone!

Leave a comment

3 — Share the love. If you know someone who may enjoy reading this, please share it with them.

Share

P.S. If you want to reach me directly, you can respond to this email or message me on Substack Chat.

Every two weeks, I drive thirty minutes into town from my family’s rural cottage to grab groceries and do laundry. While waiting for my laundry during my last visit, I strolled across the street to a country market.

Stacked high in a big bin near the front of the store sat just-delivered Spanish peaches.

I bought one and walked back across the street to eat it. Standing outside the laundromat while revelling in the splendour of the hundred-year-old church next door, I took a bite of my peach.

Firm but not hard. Tart but not tangy. Sweet but not sugary. Juicy but not drippy. It was the most delicious peach I ever tasted.

In an architectural trance at the church, as my tastebuds watered for more peach, my thoughts drifted to how the Spanish peach made it to my hand in rural Ontario.

A Spanish farmer, whom I’ve never met and whose language I don’t speak, planted the peach tree, from which my peach grew, on his land at least three or four years ago.1

In the months during which my peach transformed from a hard green ball to ripened fruit, he fought moths, bugs, aphids, rodents, caterpillars, worms, and nymphs to keep the tree alive and the fruit unvandalized by hungry pests. All without the help of pesticides to maintain his organic status.

He rose early, toiled ceaselessly, and sweated under the Spanish sun to sanitize, prune, thin, and eventually harvest his peaches, ensuring his crop was delivered in top condition so he could make his living and bring back repeat customers next year.2

As I chewed on the next bite of peach, I remembered the Colombian banana farmers I watched work for a few moments in passing on a hike in Colombia two years earlier. 

One man used a machete to cut down bunches of at least fifty bananas. He tossed them to another man who caught and stacked them. As they tirelessly worked, unshaded from the midday sun, I thought of the deadly Brazilian wandering spider that lurks in banana trees. Bananas sold for less than $2 a bunch in Canada. Those men were risking their lives for pennies.

*

You and I live in a neverending river of abundance.

But many around the globe still live today in what was the natural human condition up until the last eighty years: extreme scarcity.

The case for saying grace isn’t a religious one.

Humans lived in harsh scarcity for nearly all of our existence. Having an abundance of food is an extremely new phenomenon.

A short grace is a way of being thankful that we live in a time and place of plenty. It’s a way to recognize that our food has been provided by a farmer in a faraway land who worked very hard for months to grow what we nourish ourselves with.

Food doesn’t appear on shelves in bottomless supply without hard work and sacrifice. 

Saying grace gives recognition that life died for food to appear on our plates. Life had to be sacrificed to produce meat. And in tending to and ploughing the fields of wheat, corn, potato, and other crops that makeup so much of our diet, mice, rats, birds, rabbits, frogs, lizards, moles, possums, snakes, and insects are killed.

Then by some staggeringly sophisticated supply chain, food travels around the world to a nearby store where we buy it with no effort, other than the effort we put into our jobs to earn money. Yet punching at a keyboard all day is a hairline fraction of the amount of effort it takes to grow food.

Pausing for a moment to be grateful before taking the first bite is a thank you to the animals that died, the farmers that worked, and the supply chain that delivered us our food.

With love,

Thanks to for planting the seed for this essay in my head by bringing a practice of grace to our dinner table. And to for your wise, thoughtful, and helpful edits on an early draft of this piece.

Subscribe for new essays every Thursday:

Subscribe now

Quote I’m pondering:

Winston Churchill’s first speech as Prime Minister on blood, toil, tears, and sweat (13 May 1940):

“I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many long months of toil and struggle.

You ask what is our policy. I will say, it is to wage war with all our might, with all the strength that God can give us, to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.

You ask what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terror. Victory however long and hard the road may be. For without victory there is no survival.”

Thanks for reading!

1 — Leave a like. I’d be grateful if you’d consider tapping the “heart” ❤️ at the top or bottom of this page.

2 — Let’s chat. If this resonates or you want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear from you and I respond to everyone!

Leave a comment

3 — Share the love. If you know someone who may enjoy reading this, please share it with them.

Share

P.S. If you want to reach me directly, you can respond to this email or message me on Substack Chat.

The town of Jardín, which translates to garden, is nestled in the Andes mountain range in northwestern Colombia.

It took me four twisting turning hours by bus to arrive there from Medellín—the bustling metropolitan made famous for being home to deceased drug lord Pablo Escobar.

I stepped off the bus one block west of the town square to deserted streets and brightly painted houses with colourful floral displays adorning their balconies. After spending the last week in Colombia’s second-largest city, I was excited to step back in time to a small, simple town, home mostly to retirees, surrounded by lush green mountains beckoning me to hike them.

I spent my first day in Jardín touring the town.

Walking the streets. Revering the church. Ducking into explorable buildings. Lounging in the town square with endless café con leches and my book and leather-bound journal in hand. Exchanging smiles and shy Spanish salutations with the local seniors who were going about their daily meetings and minglings in the town square. 

But Jardín is small.

By late afternoon, I had walked every street enough times to have a map of the town imprinted in my brain.

Earlier that day, a fellow backpacker at my rather uninhabited hostel had recommended a twenty-kilometre hike featuring four waterfalls. I set my alarm for 6 a.m. so I could have the trail to myself and return before the sun reached its blistering, skin-burning, height.

The next morning, I snatched my pre-packed bag, which contained nothing more than water, my journal and Kindle, and a raincoat, and started walking.

The sun was cresting the horizon and, other than farmers in produce-stacked pick-up trucks making early morning deliveries, I had the town to myself. I walked five blocks through the still brisk morning then went left on a dirt road that would take me to the trailhead.

The dirt road steeply departed the city and contained a few shanty houses.

As I passed the last house at the bottom of the hill, sharp ear-piercing barks froze me solid. I heard gravel and stones being kicked up and scattered under fast-moving paws. My heart held its beat until I saw them. Two dogs tearing out in tandem from behind the house.

Dirty rural untrained dogs coming for me.

I bent down and picked up the biggest bludgeoning rock around me while clearing my throat and preparing to yell with as much assertion as I could muster.

The dogs bolted directly towards me, barking like police hounds with each bounding stride they took. I held my ground. At the last second before they made contact, they cut left and turned down the road I was walking.

If their bluff charge was a test, I passed. Relieved and reassured, I walked on.

The dogs went ahead, shamelessly changing their disposition from aggressive attack mode to floppy-tongue-hanging-out-of-a-slightly-smiling-muzzle.

“Mhmm, this is strange,” I thought. “Must be a coincidence that I happen to be walking the same way they’re heading.”

One kilometre turned into three and three turned into ten and the dogs were still with me.

They explored with dogged curiosity. They would run off the trail, dodge into the thick jungle brush, roll in the grass, and, despite my yelling pleas to stop it, corner and ceaselessly bark at terrorized grazing cows.

But whenever they got too far ahead, they returned to the trail, sat, and looked back, waiting to make eye contact with me to ensure I was coming.

We made it to the first waterfall.

I filled my canteen, the dogs lapped up water, and all three of us stopped for a moment to enjoy the view.

I didn’t feed or pet them once but those dogs were fiercely loyal to me.

They barked viciously at other hikers we passed on the trail, looking back at me for approval of their needless defence. I smiled, apologized, and told them the dogs really are harmless. “They aren’t even my dogs” I sheepishly implored, “they’ve just been following me since I left town.”

Ten kilometres in, near the final waterfall and turn-around point, the trail faded into dense pathless jungle. I tried to bushwack my way through to pick up a trace of the trail again.

Scared of getting lost and helplessly swallowed by the jungle, I only went so far on each stabbing attempt at finding the trail before retracing my steps to try a different path. The dogs stayed within a few feet of me the entire time. After thirty minutes and no luck picking up the trail, I called it and started the hike back to town.

The dogs turned back with me.

Hours later, we arrived at the dirt road where they had first joined me. As I mounted the hill back to town, I realized that my loyal hiking partners had silently disappeared behind the house where they had first emerged.

I pulled my journal from my backpack for the first time that day and scribbled:

Some of our greatest experiences, stories, and memories stem from random unexpected coincidence. The universe has a way of bestowing our fate upon us when we least expect it.

But to receive these serendipitous gifts, to allow them to enter our lives, we need to be open, relaxed, and welcoming in the face of uncertainty.

There are times to act quickly, intentionally, and harshly. Other times call for surrender. To have trust in yourself, faith in the universe, and to let things play out.

Pleased that I surrendered to the dogs instead of scaring them off, I smiled at the hilarity of the story fate gifted me that day as I walked back to my hostel.

With love,

Subscribe for new stories every Thursday:

Subscribe now

More footage from Jardín:

Quote I’m pondering:

in her article, Our New Religion Isn't Enough:

“And we mimic religion, all the time. We don’t pray at night; we repeat positive affirmations. We don’t confess; we trauma dump. We don’t seek salvation; we go on healing journeys. We don’t resist temptation from the devil; we reframe intrusive thoughts. We don’t exorcise evil spirits; we release trauma. And of course we don’t talk to God, c’mon—we give a “specific request to the universe” that “has a greater plan” for us.

I think a lot of the problems young people are facing in the Western world stem from the fact that we killed God and had nothing to replace him with but ourselves.

As David Foster Wallace said:

“There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

I’m not religious. But I know what it means to worship something else—at all costs health optimization—and to have it eat me alive.

Thanks for reading!

1 — Leave a like. I’d be grateful if you’d consider tapping the “heart” ❤️ at the top or bottom of this page.

2 — Let’s chat. If this resonates or you want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear from you and I respond to everyone!

Leave a comment

3 — Share the love. If you know someone who may enjoy reading this, please share it with them.

Share

P.S. If you want to reach me directly, you can respond to this email or message me on Substack Chat.

Every three months, I send paid subscribers a long-form piece of content.

This quarter, I’m sharing my book notes from the most impactful book I’ve read this year: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. I took 200+ highlights while reading the book then categorized and distilled the most important ideas into their most impactful, actionable form.

Free Subscribers: To unlock 4 e-books, my book notes from Outlive and The Psychology of Money, and 50 paywalled articles, please consider upgrading to paid.

Subscribe now

Paid Subscribers: Please download your PDF copy of my book notes from The Psychology of Money here:

Read more

I was eleven.

We were playing the toughest team in our division and I wanted to send the message that we couldn’t be bullied.

I charged down the ice after one of their defensemen. He was stickhandling the puck as he skated backwards along the boards near his team’s bench. His head was up scanning the ice to make a play.

He passed the puck up ice and I took two more strides to finish my hit. As I was about to make contact, the player I was trying to flatten stepped off the ice. Skating at full speed, my right shoulder hit the inside of the boards where the bench door opens. Pain shot through my entire shoulder as if every nerve ending was being scorched by a blowtorch. 

With adrenaline masking the pain as my right arm dangled uselessly at my side, I skated off the ice and into the dressing room. Unable to play the rest of the game, I gritted my teeth to distract myself from the pain and took off my equipment with my left hand. I sat in grimacing silence and waited for the game to finish.

Because the puck had been passed away seconds before and the awkward angle of where it occurred on the ice, no one saw my injury happen. When I left the ice, my face was clenched holding back tears but no one knew why. And physically, because my sprain was invisible, I looked fine.

After the game in the dressing room, I sat there trying to display with low moans and a scrunched-up face how badly I was injured as another player on my team, who broke his collar bone that game, got a shoutout from the coach and a round of applause from the team for his physical play and sacrifice.

My injury went unrecognized.

As the hospital later confirmed, my shoulder was sprained so badly that the nurse who took my X-ray tried to convince me that hitting shouldn’t be allowed in hockey. I couldn’t move my arm a centimetre in any direction without a spiderweb of pain spreading through my shoulder.

For the next few weeks, my hand was effectively glued to my pocket—the only position that wasn’t unbearably painful—as my shoulder healed.

2. The Arm

A month after fully recovering from my shoulder sprain, I was tobogganing on an out-of-use green-rated ski hill in a valley close to our house with my mom and brother.

The hill was the length of a stretched-out Olympic track and declined so steeply—steep enough to have taken someone’s life from a head injury years before—most kids started their sled runs only halfway up.

I finally mustered the courage to go from the very top where the ski lift used to drop skiers. I jumped on my toboggan and barrelled down the hill at a speed that turned the alpines on either side of me into one continuous forest-green streak.

Halfway down, I accidentally hit a jump made of packed snow that had turned into hard, slick ice. I caught a few feet of air and my sled shot out from under me as I came crashing down on my left arm with a snap.

Unlike the shoulder sprain, I didn’t feel any sharp pain. But something felt off. I sat out as my brother took a few more runs.

By the time my mom peeled off my coat to see what my complaints were about, my arm below my elbow was purple and closer in shape to a half-circle than a straight line.

The triage nurse at the hospital, struggling to hide her panic, took one look at my arm, shot up from her desk, and rushed me to the back of the hospital for emergency surgery. If my arm wasn’t reset immediately, the lack of circulation could have starved my arm’s muscle cells of oxygen for too long leading to permanent loss of function.

My mom couldn’t bear it but my dad watched the surgery through a small glass window in the operating room door. Two nurses held my limp unconscious body down as the doctor hauled on my broken arm as if he was in the most intense match of tug-of-war in his life. Eventually, the broken bone snapped back into alignment.

Even though my arm was broken below the elbow, I drowsily woke from anesthesia with a heavy L-shaped plaster cast that stretched from my knuckles to my armpit. I would argue that the cast was more effective at ensuring I didn’t sleep than healing my arm.

After a week, the plaster cast was replaced with a lime-green fibreglass cast of the same shape. A few weeks after that, I was able to bend my arm again as my third cast, hot-pink fibreglass, stopped at the cup of my inner elbow.

The most painful part of breaking my arm, which rivalled my shoulder sprain, was the overly aggressive physiotherapist who insisted on taking my wrist through its full range of motion not five minutes after my arm was permanently relieved from its cast.

For the last month and a half, my wrist was locked in a fixed position. He sat in a chair beside me in the hallway outside the room in which my cast was just sawn off and forcefully, through my wincing protests, bent my wrist up, down, left, right.

*

My sprained shoulder and broken arm led me to miss most of that hockey season.

When I returned for the final few games, I played horribly. As soon as I touched the puck I’d fire it down the ice so I couldn’t get hit or make a pass that got intercepted by the other team. I stopped scoring, shied away from puck battles in the corner, and avoided physical contact.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t go back to playing like I did before my first injury.

I was letting my team down. I hung my head in shame and dreaded car rides home because of how embarrassed I was of my performance. My mind was paralyzed with fear and I couldn’t force myself to relax and play. Showering after games, I averted the mirror’s gaze so the word that had been ricocheting off the insides of my skull couldn’t shoot out my eyes and land on me: coward. 

That was my last season of competitive hockey.

The next year, I decided to drop down to recreational hockey where hitting isn’t allowed and play competitive soccer instead.

3. High School Days

I spent my high school years fighting the feeling that I was a coward.

Before my injuries, I played physically and never hesitated. I was blissfully ignorant of the possibility of injury. But being injured twice in the same year opened my young eyes and developing brain to the risks of high-impact activities. So much pain. Too quickly and unexpectedly. Followed by months of immobilizing recovery. 

Because those injuries happened when I was 11, they became formative experiences that shaped me. Subconsciously, the fear of injury stayed with me. I felt it as soon as I stepped on the ice for my first game back after my arm healed during that last season of competitive hockey.

I tried to beat the feeling down, but I was scared to engage in contact sports and physical activities. I felt like I was carrying a secret, ashamed of myself and terrified of others finding out I was timid in the face of physical contact.

*

But I refused to accept that I was a coward. So I built an outer life to prove that I wasn't.

I joined the football team in Grade 10 and played every minute of every game: offence, defence, and special teams. I joined the rugby team in Grades 11 and 12 and played every minute there too.

I didn’t choose to play those sports because I thought they would be fun.

On the love-hate spectrum, I was much closer to hating every second of every game and practice than loving them. I forced myself to play football and rugby, two of the most physical sports there are, to fight the fear that I had become a hesitative coward. I was on a quest to prove my courage to myself.

I pushed through and mustered as much aggression and physicality as I could.

In rugby games, I wanted to make as many hits and get as many touches on the ball as possible. I wasn’t a good tackler, but on defence, I forced myself to put my body in front of the other team’s ball carrier. I cared more about proving to myself that I wasn’t scared to get physical than whether we won the game.

But no matter how hard I tried to play, I felt threatened by every other player on the field. During kickoffs in rugby, I prayed the ball wouldn’t land in my zone because I knew that the second I jumped up and caught the ball, another player would run me over. I was big and strong, standing over six feet tall and 195 pounds of lean muscle, but felt soft inside.

A voice in my head kept whispering that I was a coward wearing a mask of courage. And I was convinced that my teammates and coaches knew it.

Those voices were still raging when I graduated. They weren’t done with me yet.

4. Sparring

Once I got to university, I was safe from playing contact sports.

But the fear that I was a coward only buried deeper within me because I no longer had an outlet, that football and rugby provided in high school, to prove myself wrong.

As the years passed and I gained more distance from high school, layers of time stacked upon each other like skin growing over an open wound. On the surface, I thought the self-assurance I was supposed to gain in adulthood had healed the injury-shaped hole in my psyche.

But below the surface, an infection festered.

I had tried to stitch over a wound—the deep-seated feeling I was a coward—without gritting my teeth at the sting of the disinfectant: the hard work I needed to do to repair my relationship with myself. In journal entries, bad dreams, and, worst of all, each time I met a varsity athlete or martial arts competitor, I was reminded of my inadequacy.

The same questions kept coming back to me:

Are you a coward? Are you scared of physicality?

To prove to myself that I wasn’t, I had to get physical.

So in the Summer of 2022, nine months after graduating from university, I joined a Krav Maga gym. Krav Maga is a self-defence martial art derived from a combination of other fighting techniques. I quickly began attending every class on the schedule, training for eight to ten hours a week, plus runs and workouts on my own time.

With each Krav class, I started to feel healing.

I felt my inhibition towards physicality fade with each punch, kick, elbow, knee, and choke I took and delivered. The timidness that had prevented me from bonding with my high school football and rugby teammates melted away. Through beating each other up, I became friends with my Krav classmates.

For the first time since I was eleven, I didn’t feel scared in physical contact. I wasn’t just getting physical, I was enjoying it. In football and rugby, I pretended to be tough. But in Krav, I started to feel deep in the spongy marrow that fills the cavities of my bones that I was courageous in the face of physicality.

Then my instructor cleared me to start attending sparring sessions. 

*

Unlike the technique and striking classes I had been attending, which consisted of violent but controlled drills, sparring is uncontrolled one-on-one fighting. 

Sitting on the dock at my family’s cottage on the weekend, looking out at a bright blue sunny sky and glass-like lake, my head was a warzone preparing for Monday’s sparring session.

The tension in my mind was so unbearable that even a crow squawking in the trees would set me off in a mumbling fit of restless rage: “God damn crows are so loud around here.” I felt the same Sunday dread for sparring classes that I used to feel when I worked twelve-plus hour days in accounting with an hour-long commute each way.

The courage I had started to feel was washed away like the sand on a tide being sucked out to sea.

I was familiar with this feeling. I had felt it in high school when I played football and rugby. And I had felt it when I first started attending Krav classes a month earlier. I knew there was only one way to fight my feelings of cowardice: Go to every single sparring class. Drop my ego. Get beat to a pulp. Keep coming back. 

So I did.

I didn’t miss one sparring session. My fears of physicality disappeared with the first punch I threw. Hour-long sparring classes passed in what felt like ten minutes. 

5. The Man In The Arena

On the bike ride home from three hours of Krav classes and sparring one Toronto summer night, I passed patios and parks full of young people eating, drinking, and laughing.

Then it hit me: I had never been a coward. Not in high school and not now.

Cowardice is opting to sit on the sidelines because of fear.

Courage isn’t playing without fear, it’s playing despite fear.

Although I felt fearful and timid, I always took action. I joined the football and rugby teams when I could have easily stuck to soccer. No one knew the internal battle I was fighting but me. And I showed up to fight that battle every day as courageously as I could.

It’s a battle I will never stop fighting.

By Autumn, I plan to land a job, move from the country back into a city, and start training BJJ.1 I know I’ll feel the same fear and hesitation some days, especially when I start sparring with guys who could choke me unconscious or break my arm before I know what’s happening to me.

But I will show up nonetheless. 

Because the only way through fear is to plant my feet firmly in the arena.

With love,

Thank you for multiple rounds of incredibly helpful feedback on this essay.

Subscribe for new stories every Thursday:

Subscribe now

Quote I’m pondering:

Frank Herbert in Dune:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Chills. This may be my favourite quote of all time.

The Man In The Arena

In Paris on April 23, 1910, the 26th U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt, gave a speech titled "Citizenship In A Republic."

One section of that speech, The Man In The Arena, is famously remembered.

The last week:

Thanks for reading!

1 — Leave a like. I’d be grateful if you’d consider tapping the “heart” ❤️ at the top or bottom of this page.

2 — Let’s chat. If you want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear from you and I respond to everyone!

Leave a comment

3 — Share the love. If you know someone who may enjoy reading this, please share it with them.

Share Jack Dixon

P.S. If you want to reach me directly, please respond to this email or message me on Substack Chat.